ARM Techcon 2012 started yesterday with a major announcement, as ARM unveiled the ARM Cortex A50 series, the first 64-bit ARM Core based on ARMv8 architecture. The company announced 2 cores that can be used independently or in combination to take advantage of big.LITTLE processing: Cortex-A57 – 64-bit core that offers 3x the performance of 2012 superphone in 32-bit, 5x power-efficiency and is scalable beyond 16 cores. It’s the big core in big.LITTLE. Cortex-A53 – 64-bit core that offers the same performance as Cortex A9 but with 4x power efficiency and 25% the size of today CPUs. It’s the LITTLE core in big.LITTLE. Those cores manufactured using 28nm, 20nm and eventually 14nm process technology will be used in smartphones, tablets. mobile computers and servers (See AMD/ARM announcement). They’ll be software compatible with ARMv7-A processors (Aarch32) which should greatly facilitate the transition and support both 64-bit and 32-bit OS and applications, although obviously 64-bit apps won’t run on 32-bit OS. Engadget …

AMD announced it will design processors based on 64-bit ARM technology in addition to its x86 processors for the cloud and data center servers. AMD will be the first company to provide both x86 and ARM solutions to the server market, and the first ARM-based server CPU is scheduled for 2014. There aren’t much details at this time, but AMD did say it will be take advantage of AMD SeaMicro Freedom supercompute fabric in order to link CPU, Ethernet and Storage and the processor will be sold as an AMD Opteron CPU. Interestingly, the company does not plan to design 64-bit ARM processor for the client market (e.g. Windows RT) for the time being. Red Hat and AMD partnered for the server software, and Red Hat has started to work to bring support for the next generation of 64-bit ARM server processors to the Fedora Project include 64-bit ARM OpenJDK. More details are available over here on Red Hat 64-bit …

As Google unveiled Nexus 4 smartphone and Nexus 10 tablet, they also announced Android 4.2, the latest version of Google operating system, that brings the following new features. Photo Sphere Camera Going beyond panoramic photo shots, photo sphere allows you to generate a 360 degrees panorama by taking pictures in all direction, up, down, right and left. Head over Google maps to see a few examples. Keyboard with Gesture Typing You can now just glides over the letters you want to type, and the new improved keyboard will find the word you want to type. The keyboard is also said to be able to anticipate the next word allowing to type a full sentence by just selecting suggested words. Google also claims text-to-speech capabilities and voice typing have been improved, and you don’t need an internet connection to type with your voice anymore. Multiple User Profiles This is the most important new feature to me, as when you let others …

The Yocto Project Release 1.3 has just been announced. This release codenamed “Danny” and based on Poky 8.0 is the fifth release of the project. The Yocto Project is a framework to assist developers in creating embedded Linux distributions. New features and updates for the Yocto Project 1.3 Improved terminal UI, which makes it easy to see the tasks that are currently executing, and avoids burying any warnings that are printed. Eliminated intermediate step when building cross compiler toolchain Relocatable SDK Large number of usability improvements in the Hob image building UI Upgraded eglibc to version 2.16 Upgraded gcc to version 4.7 Upgraded Linux kernel version to 3.4.11 Added yocto-bsp script for automating the initial parts of creating a new BSP Python functions now consistently use four spaces for indentation – no more having to try to match the mix of tabs and spaces in your recipes Disabled sharing shared state between machines using different distros by default to avoid …

Xibo has just announced the release of Xibo 1.4.0 (codename: “Brorsen”). Contrary to version 1.3.0 which was a development release, Xibo 1.4.0 is a stable release and you should consider updating your current installations if you want to take advantage of some of the 27 new features and/or 108 bug fixes. This version replaces the previous stable version (1.2.2) released 18 months ago. If you are not familiar with Xibo, it is an open source Client/Server digital signage framework that can run in Windows (.NET implementation) and Linux (Client: Python, Server: LAMP). For some more details, you can read my introduction to Xibo and/or a “getting started” tutorial I wrote some time ago. Main new features in Xibo 1.4.0 Significant improvements to permissions – View, Edit and Delete permissions can now be set on the following items: Library Media Layouts Regions in Layouts Media on Region Timelines DataSets Display Groups Displays A new timeline editing window – Improvements have been …